Gear Loader Working

I’d like to report another milestone in the development of GearHead in Python: that item on the right is the first bona fide Gear to be loaded from disk and displayed onscreen. It’s a human scale class 5 armor plate. As in previous GearHead games, I’ve written a parser to load mecha and item designs from human readable text files.

Why create my own parser when there are tons of serializers already available for Python? Two reasons. First, so I can maintain a format close to the GearHead1 and GearHead2 mecha description files. Using json or whatnot to design mecha would require too much semantic acrobatics. Second, because it was easy. It’s fully functional and only around 80 lines of code.